I came up with the idea last spring, after more than a decade of teaching Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried to dual enrollment high school seniors. By then, I knew the narratives and structures so well, I could have listed its chapter titles solely from memory.
Students really connect to The Things They Carried. They believe it. They feel Lt. Jimmy Cross’s guilt at soldier Ted Lavender’s death, and their hearts break for Norman Bowker as he circles the lake, realizing that his world moved on and that he didn’t really survive the loss of Kiowa in that field.
Some are awakened by humility, realizing they’d never given the soldier’s experience its due in their minds.
And then comes Chapter 18, “Good Form,” in which O’Brien admits he’s been making things up. That’s when I see heat from being duped warm their faces. That’s when, in 2015, one student threw his copy on the ground.
“I feel betrayed. I’ll never read a high school book again.”
Last spring, months after we’d finished the unit, my students were still buzzing about O’Brien. While adapting short stories into films, one group argued about shooting scenes in vignettes: “It’ll still make sense. Just like in The Things They Carried!”
That student idea brought me a revelation — all this time, I was teaching this book as an academic exercise, but it turned out I was the one who desperately needed what it had to offer. My own book had been living within me, dormant but clawing its way out. The boundary between “teacher” and “writer” collapsed when I realized that the tools I had been giving teenagers were actually the ones I needed to write about my own “war” in suburbia.
I’ve always known that I have to tell my story. Part of the trauma that comes from the specific abuse I experienced as a child, and really, through my 30s, leaves me feeling unheard, unseen and unimportant. But how do you write about that?
The happening-truth, or, the facts of what actually occurred, were typical enough to disguise the abuse from outsiders. I was raised in a 2,600-square-foot colonial with half-brick, half-siding exterior, painted white with green shutters. My parents talked about credit scores as if they represented moral worth. We ate dinner as a family every night.
Listing the facts feels like being complicit in the gaslighting. It feels like filing a police report for the crime of parenting. The container doesn’t fit the contents.
I’ve learned that it’s hard to find the proper container for an abuse story — they aren’t linear. Trauma is chaotic and has no beginning, middle or end. There are frequently complicated dynamics at play. Trying to force it into a standard narrative arc wouldn’t work because the form didn’t match the function.
I realized last spring that I could use O’Brien’s bead-on-a-string structure for his Vietnam War book as a framework for my own story. I could replace his characters with people from my life, and change the backdrop from the jungles of Vietnam to the suburbs of Frederick, Md., and Levittown, N.Y. It was a gamble, but pursuing the project felt worthwhile.
I approached the draft like an architect studying a building. Using a spreadsheet, I gave each of O’Brien’s vignettes its own tab and broke them down into foundational story components: summary, characters and thematic and structural components to transfer.
Once I had the blueprint created, I started listening to the audiobook. Brought back to the jungle, I stored ideas for possible story adaptation and titles on the spreadsheet. I brainstormed, and when ideas for specific chapters came to me at random times, I used my phone to access the spreadsheet and typed them up quickly into the corresponding chapter tab. The spreadsheet allowed me to see the book as a series of small projects instead of a cathedral to build by hand.
I treated the spreadsheet cells like digital index cards. I could stack disjointed ideas vertically: a snippet of dialogue here, a memory of smell there, allowing them to accumulate without forcing them into a narrative until I was ready to draft.
To adapt O’Brien’s framework fully, I used metaphor to demonstrate reality. Specifically, I applied the language of war to the world of suburbia. My strict, unstable mother became a sniper. My absent father who wanted me around at his convenience became a tick.
By the time I finished listening to The Things They Carried, my blueprint was ready. The planning phase instilled confidence that I had chosen the proper container for my story, and after the first draft, I felt the freedom of finally creating something that expresses what I want the universe to know so completely, it would inspire a teenager to throw the book to the ground.
My experiment worked, and for the same reason it works for O’Brien. It isn’t about lying; it’s about using story-truth to make the reader feel the pulse in their throat. It makes the invisible visible.
I know the experiment worked because writing soon became a way to orient myself. It came pouring out from everywhere, and every moment I would have normally spent reading or resting now went to putting words on paper.
I started writing this book right as I went back to teaching full time, so I’ve been swamped. But there’s something about being really busy that breeds productivity.
The impact of writing about these topics is that sometimes problems float to the surface. In November, my nearly-12-year-old daughter asked me over lunch if I abandoned my family. She asked in that matter-of-fact way of hers, barely looking up from her drawing.
“Do you hate them, mama?”
Answering that question with the facts would fail all of us.
Instead, I shared the story-truth: I was in a collapsed tunnel, and we were at war. I couldn’t save them even if I tried, but I could save myself. I crawled on my elbows and knees through that tunnel because I refused to die in the dark.
The writing process allowed me to distinguish between the “Good Form,” the daughter who complied with abusive family structures, and the “True Form,” the writer who survives.
Writing story-truth allows me to sleep at night. It validates the decision to leave the tunnel. It gives me a voice that feels solid and audible beyond what those of the past can suppress.
If you feel a story dormant inside you and find yourself staring at blank pages, consider looking to a classic text for a framework that could support your story. While we’re always updating the canon, classic books are there for a reason. For me, I borrowed O’Brien’s map because it was the only one that matched my terrain.
Some of us don’t write just to document; we write to survive. Sometimes, that means stealing an established structure until we’ve made it out of the tunnel. And if our books get thrown down before they’re picked back up? Good. That’s how story-truth works.
Lori Lackland has taught high school English and dual enrollment literature and composition for 23 years. Now based in the Pacific Northwest, she is currently revising her first memoir, Carrying On, in which she explores domestic abuse through the narrative framework of Tim O’Brien’s war stories. When she isn’t grading essays or dissecting literature with students, she can be found running or navigating life in Southwest Washington with her husband, daughters and dogs.
